I was today at my FLGS here in Hungary, and to my big surprise they already had the Races & Classes preview book for sale. I have no interest in buying it, and had no time to read in it for a long time (or to make notes), but here are some details I can remember.
* The book is just fluff, no game statistcs or any rules in it.
* Diferent D&D designers have written different parts of the book, it's definatly teamwork. It is always mentioned who wrote which chapter or which paragraph.
* The races mentioned in detail are Humans, Dwaves, Eladrins, Elves, Halflings, Tieflings, and the "mystery race", Dragonborn. Each of these races gets some pages, humans I think had the most with 4 or 5, eladrin the least with 1,5. There are 4-5 paragraphs each on some other races as well. I remember drow and gnome, but there were maybe 2 or 3 more. The gnome part was titled "The problem with gnomes" or something like that.
* The Dragonborn in their picture looked like big and well muscled lizardmen. They were antropomorphic, had two legs and no wings. It looked as if their hands had claws. If I had to judge by the picture, they should get natural bite and claw attacks.
* Halflings looked just as 3ed halflings (no hobbits).
* The classes section had details about five classes: Cleric, Fighter, Rogue, Wizard, and Warlock. Each of thes gets 3-4 pages. Then - as with the classes - there is an "other classes" section with 3-4 paragraphes for each class. I remember paladins, rangers, druids, barbarians, swordmages and warlords among those.
* I couldn't find any mention in the book why they chose to write about some races and classes in detail, and why some get only some paragraphs. While for some of the "lesser" races and classs it did say that those would appear probably in later D&D proucts, I couldn't find any passage saying that those and only those detailed would be in the PHB. (Five base classes certainly seem to much.)
* Besides races and classes there were some chapters about the designwork, about the basic things they are trying to achieve, and so on. One interesting little info I remember is that there will be just one progression for all classes, and differences between them will come from their different character ablities, feats and so on. If I remember well, BAB (and AC?) was among the things mentioned. Hp was probably also on this list, butu I don't remember well anymore, sorry.
* There were two pages about the design history, which the different stages were, and when they began.
* The art looked good, often there was a pencil sketch (concept art), and the final colored version side by side.
That's about what I can remember. I had not much time to look through the book, and sadly I have no camera on my moblie, otherwise I would have taken a picture of the table of contents.
I no that I all this might soun a strange, since I have no prrof for it. But if you look at my old posts (I don't post much, so it shouldn't be to hard to find), you'll see that my FLGS started to sell Fiendish Codex II also well before it's street date. (I don't have access tot the search function, so I can't give you a link to that thread.) My screenname on ENWorld is morbiczer.
